I stand between two generations — watching my daughters become mothers, and watching my own mother age into needing to be mothered herself. I suppose that’s why we call it being a grandmother. We mother in both directions.
Between medical appointments, home-cooked meals, play practices, lessons, school preparations, and endless activities, I have the privilege of fighting for motherhood. And there is little more anti-mother than the pro-abortion movement. To them, our tiny sons and daughters are generic “products of conception” — sacrificed to the gods of pleasure or convenience. To mothers, each little one is priceless, worth sacrificing everything for.
I remember my husband’s excitement the first time he felt a kick back through my belly. I remember my babies fluttering around in the first trimester, rolling through long stretches in the second, hiccupping in the third. I remember bringing our first son home as a young mother of twenty, my own mother at my side. I laid him gently in his crib for the first time, and the two of us stood admiring his tiny perfection. Then my mom started laughing at me. “You’re rocking!” she said. “You are a mother!” She was right. Without realizing it, I was standing over my baby, swaying side to side.
Mothering spans the full range of emotion: the joy of holding each child for the first time, the fear of watching doctors fight to save a son born two and a half months early, the pain of losing a grandson, stillborn at twenty-four weeks. Yet, not once have I doubted the miraculous nature of new life. From the very first moments, through the joy and the pain, I understood that life is a sacred trust.
More than thirty years of mothering later, I’ve logged thousands of hours. I’ve dealt with colic and unexplained illness, learned to place a G-tube and monitor oxygen levels, developed strategies for learning disabilities, and learned to focus on what matters most amid the chaos. Watching my children experience joy, struggle, find answers, and grow has been a heart-stretching, soul-enriching adventure I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Most recently, we celebrated a family reunion four generations deep, including most of my mother’s thirty grandchildren. Mom has been struggling with severe GI pain for some time — yet surrounded by so many she loved, and who loved her back, I didn’t see pain cross her face once, all week. She was immersed in joy.
This — this motherness — is what the radical left despises. Motherhood is treated as weakness. Women are called incubators, or worse, victims of parasites. And somehow we’re supposed to believe these are the champions of womanhood?
Advocates want you to believe Idaho’s radical abortion initiative, Prop 1, is about doctors and women. It isn’t. The initiative eliminates the physician-only requirement Idaho put in place to protect women during the Roe era — and yet voters are being asked to simply trust doctors to handle it. Contrast that purported trust with the calloused disregard for life stamped on every page of Proposition 1, a proposal that allows abortion on demand for any reason well into the third trimester, prohibiting any regulation of abortion except where narrowly tailored to improve the mother’s health — effectively ensuring that abortion, by any method, can be performed up until a baby can be born and survive without extraordinary medical support.
We have already seen where that kind of trust, unmoored from real limits, can lead. Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider, was a product of that trust: convicted in 2013 of murdering infants born alive during late-term procedures — babies he delivered, then killed. Gosnell is remembered as a serial killer, not a healer. His crimes were possible only in a system that had stopped asking what happens to a child who survives abortion — let alone a child killed while still in the womb. This calloused disregard for preborn life — the view of babies as parasites rather than people — is what makes it possible to describe the willful destruction of preborn life as a “service” to women.
To anyone who values women and motherhood, that framing is not compassionate. Proposition 1 is an affront. The disregard for the tiny life a mother nurtures could not be more offensive. The disregard for the miracle of mothering could not be more complete.
I am Mother — and with that motherness comes deep strength and determination. I will defend these little ones. I will defend the legal protections that safeguard Idaho mothers, mothering, and the miracle of new life — for Idaho’s generations yet unborn. Join me in steadfastly opposing Proposition 1. It is far too extreme for Idaho!